SQL full text search behavior on numeric values - sql

I have a table with about 200 million records. One of the columns is defined as varchar(100) and it's included in a full text index. Most of the values are numeric. Only few are not numeric.
The problem is that it's not working well. For example if a row contains the value '123456789' and i look for '567', it's not returning this row. It will only return rows where the value is exactly '567'.
What am I doing wrong?
sql server 2012.
Thanks.

Full text search doesn't support leading wildcards
In my setup, these return the same
SELECT *
FROM [dbo].[somelogtable]
where CONTAINS (logmessage, N'28400')
SELECT *
FROM [dbo].[somelogtable]
where CONTAINS (logmessage, N'"2840*"')
This gives zero rows
SELECT *
FROM [dbo].[somelogtable]
where CONTAINS (logmessage, N'"*840*"')
You'll have to use LIKE or some fancy trigram approach

The problem is probably that you are using a wrong tool since Full-text queries perform linguistic searches and it seems like you want to use simple "like" condition.
If you want to get a solution to your needs then you can post DDL+DML+'desired result'

You can do this:
....your_query.... LIKE '567%' ;
This will return all the rows that have a number 567 in the beginning, end or in between somewhere.

99% You're missing % after and before the string you search in the LIKE clause.
es:
SELECT * FROM t WHERE att LIKE '66'
is the same as as using WHERE att = '66'
if you write:
SELECT * FROM t WHERE att LIKE '%66%'
will return you all the lines containing 2 'sixes' one after other

Related

Access And/Or exclusions

I have some sample data like:
|H.RISK|NOTE|NORMAL|
The | are actually in the data, it's a String.
I am using Access, and am trying to exclude records that contain RISK in the String.
Sample query:
SELECT * FROM someTable WHERE (UCase(someTable.Field) NOT LIKE '*RISK*') AND (UCase(someTable.Field) NOT LIKE '*Blah*') AND someTable.SomeOtherField <> 4;
The problem is, the query is returning the above sample record, even though it does contain the string RISK.
I've tried the same query but switched to OR instead of AND but get the same results.
How can I properly structure this query to exclude records which contain certain strings?
Seeing that it appears you are running using the SQL syntax, try with the correct wild card.
SELECT * FROM someTable WHERE (someTable.Field NOT LIKE '%RISK%') AND (someTable.Field NOT LIKE '%Blah%') AND someTable.SomeOtherField <> 4;

Return rows where first character is non-alpha

I'm trying to retrieve all columns that start with any non alpha characters in SQlite but can't seem to get it working. I've currently got this code, but it returns every row:
SELECT * FROM TestTable WHERE TestNames NOT LIKE '[A-z]%'
Is there a way to retrieve all rows where the first character of TestNames are not part of the alphabet?
Are you going first character only?
select * from TestTable WHERE substr(TestNames,1) NOT LIKE '%[^a-zA-Z]%'
The substr function (can also be called as left() in some SQL languages) will help isolate the first char in the string for you.
edit:
Maybe substr(TestNames,1,1) in sqllite, I don't have a ready instance to test the syntax there on.
Added:
select * from TestTable WHERE Upper(substr(TestNames,1,1)) NOT in ('A','B','C','D','E',....)
Doesn't seem optimal, but functionally will work. Unsure what char commands there are to do a range of letters in SQLlite.
I used 'upper' to make it so you don't need to do lower case letters in the not in statement...kinda hope SQLlite knows what that is.
try
SELECT * FROM TestTable WHERE TestNames NOT LIKE '[^a-zA-Z]%'
SELECT * FROM NC_CRIT_ATTACH WHERE substring(FILENAME,1,1) NOT LIKE '[A-z]%';
SHOULD be a little faster as it is
A) First getting all of the data from the first column only, then scanning it.
B) Still a full-table scan unless you index this column.

How do I sort a VARCHAR column in PostgreSQL that contains words and numbers?

I need to order a select query using a varchar column, using numerical and text order. The query will be done in a java program, using jdbc over postgresql.
If I use ORDER BY in the select clause I obtain:
1
11
2
abc
However, I need to obtain:
1
2
11
abc
The problem is that the column can also contain text.
This question is similar (but targeted for SQL Server):
How do I sort a VARCHAR column in SQL server that contains words and numbers?
However, the solution proposed did not work with PostgreSQL.
Thanks in advance, regards,
I had the same problem and the following code solves it:
SELECT ...
FROM table
order by
CASE WHEN column < 'A'
THEN lpad(column, size, '0')
ELSE column
END;
The size var is the length of the varchar column, e.g 255 for varying(255).
You can use regular expression to do this kind of thing:
select THECOL from ...
order by
case
when substring(THECOL from '^\d+$') is null then 9999
else cast(THECOL as integer)
end,
THECOL
First you use regular expression to detect whether the content of the column is a number or not. In this case I use '^\d+$' but you can modify it to suit the situation.
If the regexp doesn't match, return a big number so this row will fall to the bottom of the order.
If the regexp matches, convert the string to number and then sort on that.
After this, sort regularly with the column.
I'm not aware of any database having a "natural sort", like some know to exist in PHP. All I've found is various functions:
Natural order sort in Postgres
Comment in the PostgreSQL ORDER BY documentation

Searching a column containing CSV data in a MySQL table for existence of input values

I have a table say, ITEM, in MySQL that stores data as follows:
ID FEATURES
--------------------
1 AB,CD,EF,XY
2 PQ,AC,A3,B3
3 AB,CDE
4 AB1,BC3
--------------------
As an input, I will get a CSV string, something like "AB,PQ". I want to get the records that contain AB or PQ. I realized that we've to write a MySQL function to achieve this. So, if we have this magical function MATCH_ANY defined in MySQL that does this, I would then simply execute an SQL as follows:
select * from ITEM where MATCH_ANY(FEAURES, "AB,PQ") = 0
The above query would return the records 1, 2 and 3.
But I'm running into all sorts of problems while implementing this function as I realized that MySQL doesn't support arrays and there's no simple way to split strings based on a delimiter.
Remodeling the table is the last option for me as it involves lot of issues.
I might also want to execute queries containing multiple MATCH_ANY functions such as:
select * from ITEM where MATCH_ANY(FEATURES, "AB,PQ") = 0 and MATCH_ANY(FEATURES, "CDE")
In the above case, we would get an intersection of records (1, 2, 3) and (3) which would be just 3.
Any help is deeply appreciated.
Thanks
First of all, the database should of course not contain comma separated values, but you are hopefully aware of this already. If the table was normalised, you could easily get the items using a query like:
select distinct i.Itemid
from Item i
inner join ItemFeature f on f.ItemId = i.ItemId
where f.Feature in ('AB', 'PQ')
You can match the strings in the comma separated values, but it's not very efficient:
select Id
from Item
where
instr(concat(',', Features, ','), ',AB,') <> 0 or
instr(concat(',', Features, ','), ',PQ,') <> 0
For all you REGEXP lovers out there, I thought I would add this as a solution:
SELECT * FROM ITEM WHERE FEATURES REGEXP '[[:<:]]AB|PQ[[:>:]]';
and for case sensitivity:
SELECT * FROM ITEM WHERE FEATURES REGEXP BINARY '[[:<:]]AB|PQ[[:>:]]';
For the second query:
SELECT * FROM ITEM WHERE FEATURES REGEXP '[[:<:]]AB|PQ[[:>:]]' AND FEATURES REGEXP '[[:<:]]CDE[[:>:]];
Cheers!
select *
from ITEM where
where CONCAT(',',FEAURES,',') LIKE '%,AB,%'
or CONCAT(',',FEAURES,',') LIKE '%,PQ,%'
or create a custom function to do your MATCH_ANY
Alternatively, consider using RLIKE()
select *
from ITEM
where ','+FEATURES+',' RLIKE ',AB,|,PQ,';
Just a thought:
Does it have to be done in SQL? This is the kind of thing you might normally expect to write in PHP or Python or whatever language you're using to interface with the database.
This approach means you can build your query string using whatever complex logic you need and then just submit a vanilla SQL query, rather than trying to build a procedure in SQL.
Ben

Regular expressions inside SQL Server

I have stored values in my database that look like 5XXXXXX, where X can be any digit. In other words, I need to match incoming SQL query strings like 5349878.
Does anyone have an idea how to do it?
I have different cases like XXXX7XX for example, so it has to be generic. I don't care about representing the pattern in a different way inside the SQL Server.
I'm working with c# in .NET.
You can write queries like this in SQL Server:
--each [0-9] matches a single digit, this would match 5xx
SELECT * FROM YourTable WHERE SomeField LIKE '5[0-9][0-9]'
stored value in DB is: 5XXXXXX [where x can be any digit]
You don't mention data types - if numeric, you'll likely have to use CAST/CONVERT to change the data type to [n]varchar.
Use:
WHERE CHARINDEX(column, '5') = 1
AND CHARINDEX(column, '.') = 0 --to stop decimals if needed
AND ISNUMERIC(column) = 1
References:
CHARINDEX
ISNUMERIC
i have also different cases like XXXX7XX for example, so it has to be generic.
Use:
WHERE PATINDEX('%7%', column) = 5
AND CHARINDEX(column, '.') = 0 --to stop decimals if needed
AND ISNUMERIC(column) = 1
References:
PATINDEX
Regex Support
SQL Server 2000+ supports regex, but the catch is you have to create the UDF function in CLR before you have the ability. There are numerous articles providing example code if you google them. Once you have that in place, you can use:
5\d{6} for your first example
\d{4}7\d{2} for your second example
For more info on regular expressions, I highly recommend this website.
Try this
select * from mytable
where p1 not like '%[^0-9]%' and substring(p1,1,1)='5'
Of course, you'll need to adjust the substring value, but the rest should work...
In order to match a digit, you can use [0-9].
So you could use 5[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] and [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]7[0-9][0-9][0-9]. I do this a lot for zip codes.
SQL Wildcards are enough for this purpose. Follow this link: http://www.w3schools.com/SQL/sql_wildcards.asp
you need to use a query like this:
select * from mytable where msisdn like '%7%'
or
select * from mytable where msisdn like '56655%'